


send reid

by heyyoureokay



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Ableism, Autistic Spencer Reid, Canon Autistic Character, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, Non-Graphic Violence, Nonverbal Communication, Rescue, anti-autistic ableism, quiet hands
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:54:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24419998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyyoureokay/pseuds/heyyoureokay
Summary: She wakes up unsure of where she is. Her gaze darts around the unfamiliar room, bright and antiseptic and loud with beeping and intercom voices and conversations just outside, and she hisses out a breath to try to calm herself down, then hums a single low note, again and again.A tall man with wavy brown hair turns away from the window to face her as she stirs.“Hi,” he says, softly.
Relationships: Spencer Reid & Original Female Character(s), Spencer Reid & Reader
Comments: 10
Kudos: 132
Collections: criminal minds hurt/comfort





	1. Chapter 1

The agents barrel through the house and down the staircase, spinning their flashlights around the dark, dirty room. “Clear,” one shouts, and then another, “clear,” before Prentiss’ voice: “Hey, over here.” 

All the flashlight beams focus on a young woman, curled up in a corner, knees drawn up to her chest and squinting at the sudden brightness. Her hair is matted with blood. It’s hard to tell how injured she is looking down at her in the harsh shadows of the FBI-issued tactical flashlights, but it plainly isn’t good. She has spiraling welts across her legs and chest, like jellyfish stings, and her feet are bloody. 

One of the locals shouts up the stairs for medics as Prentiss holsters her gun and bends down to her. “Hi,” she says, gingerly. “My name’s Emily. I’m with the FBI. You’re safe now.” She assesses her bonds quickly. The bound woman does not react, still shrinking away from the light and sound of the agents’ investigation and shaking slightly.

“We’ll get something to cut these chains with,” Emily continues, and as she does, she puts a hand to the heavy restraints around the woman’s bruised ankles. 

She immediately shudders back and suddenly begins to make a strange sound, a single keening, humming note from high in her throat. She scrunches her eyes closed and brings her arms up across her chest. They’re bandaged and crudely splinted. Everything about the gesture says “no — stay away — don’t touch me.”

Emily backs away and turns to her fellow agents. “We need to get her out of here.” 

“No kidding,” says Rossi.

JJ makes her own attempt to comfort the captured woman, trying to exude motherly calm, reassuring her that nobody will hurt her, that it’s over, but she has no success. 

Two medics come racing down the stairs, closely followed by an agent with bolt cutters. As the men approach her, she flutters her hands wildly, and the sound gets even louder, rising in tone. Her breathing is coming in stuttering gasps and she’s pressed as far against the wall as she can go. She retches bile down her chin.

“We’ll have to sedate her,” one of the medics says. 

Morgan’s protests that they need her conscious and alert are met with a sad shrug from Rossi. 

“We don’t have a choice,” he says. “But let’s have Reid there when she wakes up.”


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes up unsure of where she is. She doesn’t open her eyes at first, afraid of what she might see. Instead she scrunches them tight, scrunches her whole face tight, and tries to clench and release her hands in time with it. But her hands are immobilized, and she can’t quite feel them, and that at last makes her open her eyes. Her gaze darts around the unfamiliar room, bright and antiseptic and loud with beeping and intercom voices and conversations just outside, and she hisses out a breath to try to calm herself down, then hums a single low note, again and again. 

A tall man with wavy brown hair turns away from the window to face her as she stirs. 

“Hi,” he says, softly. 

With a pained effort she pulls up her bandaged legs under the gown and hospital blanket and buries her head in her knees, propped up on the hospital bed, and braces herself. 

“My name is Doctor Spencer Reid. I’m with the FBI. You’re in the hospital. Can you tell me your name?” 

She doesn’t answer in words but the humming goes up in pitch to a more discordant, alarmed sound. Her bandaged arms go around the back of her head, as if shielding her face. There’s tubes in her arms above the splints but she’s hardly aware of them except as another sensory intrusion. There’s more tubes in her nose and chest and bandages and she wants them gone — away — too much — stop. She can’t pick them out, can’t move her fingers or rock enough so she tries to bite down hard on her own arm, but can’t get a good grip, so she hits instead, whacking her splinted arm against her head to try to focus, to narrow down the world to one concrete, controllable thing. 

The man — Dr. Reid — quietly huffs out a breath as he reassesses his approach. She hears footsteps but can’t hold onto a sense of what they mean — and then the room promptly goes dim as Reid switches off the lights. The room is still lit by the light from the windows and the hospital hallway and the machines all around her, but the painful sting of the fluorescents is blissfully lessened. After a moment the hitting calms down to more gentle taps. 

Finally she can focus a bit better in the slightly reduced sensory pressure on her eyes and ears and ribcage, enough to lift her head slightly towards Dr. Reid, who is now busily ruffling through the contents of his leather messenger bag. 

He surfaces with something and holds it up for her to see. Her eyes flick to the object, his hands, his face, then away, and back. He doesn’t try to make eye contact. After a long moment her brain catches up and identifies the object: a pair of purple ear defenders. 

He waits until he sees a flicker of recognition cross her face. 

“Would these help?” 

Another long moment, in which he waits patiently, unmoving, and then a small short sound and an upward twitch of her head. She fights internally to lower her hands from her head. 

He comes closer, moving slowly and evenly, giving her plenty of time to follow his movements and ready to back up again if she indicates to him that’s what she wants, but she doesn’t cry out or fight like Prentiss had told him she had where she’d been kept. Her whole body is held tense and contained as he finally comes within reach. 

He gestures to her immobilized hands and keeps his phrasing clear and direct. “Do you need help to put them on?” 

Her head twitches upward again and she makes the sound again and slowly, so slowly, lowers her arms from her head. Her eyes follow him as he carefully pushes her hair back and places the ear defenders over her ears before steadily moving away again, to a chair on the opposite side of the room. 

He doesn’t try to meet her eyes, but instead crosses his legs and looks off quietly, his fingers tapping a pattern against his knee and his foot bouncing. 

She continues to watch him warily — as warily as she can given that she is still deeply distressed — but he seems content to simply sit there, so slowly her body starts to relax, her brain starting to clear now that the sound and lights have been reduced from a strangling force to a dull roar and she can begin to process where she is and what’s going on. Her eyes close and she focuses only on her breathing and self-soothing. They sit like this, together but safely apart, until she’s ready.


	3. Chapter 3

Looking in on the hospital room from the hallway, Hotch and Morgan stand stone-faced. 

The two had prepared to come rushing in to hold her down as she began to hit herself, only stopped by a series of extremely pointed looks from Reid. Of course he was right — she had been restrained before and was clearly terrified of touch, but their initial reaction was hard to break: to step in to disrupt a situation of violence, even self-directed. 

“Man, we don’t have time for this,” Morgan says, impatience dripping from his voice as he watches the painstaking process and then Reid just sitting in a corner doing nothing. “I don’t mean to be harsh, but she’s the only one who can help us find the unsub. If she won’t or can’t communicate with us we may never find this son of a bitch.” 

“Reid’s gotten more out of her than anyone else has so far,” Hotch reasons. “Even if she hasn’t been able to tell us anything about the unsub.

“He’s shown us that she’s aware of her surroundings. She gave an affirmative response when he asked her about the headphones. She’s aware; she’s cognizant. And Rossi was right in his assessment that her reactions were more than the result of the trauma. If she’s autistic, which she appears to be, that’s vital information for us to have. We can use that to begin searching for her identity and to characterize the victimology of the unsub. It’s promising.” 

“I get that, Hotch, and I wish we could give her all the time she needs to get to a point where it’s therapeutically possible for her to talk to us comfortably, but we just don’t have that time. He could have other victims or be getting ready to run and we might not find him until he’s killed again. This may be our only shot.”

Hotch doesn’t say anything, just looks on thoughtfully at the small figure huddled in the hospital bed, rocking back and forth gently, and his team member, who is tapping his foot and fiddling with his hands, looking off to one side. 

Morgan heaves an annoyed sigh and walks off to rejoin the rest of the team, leaving his boss staring in to the quiet scene with eyebrows lowered and arms crossed. 

After a while, she’s able to lift her face from her knees and look up at Dr. Reid again, ear defenders still on. 

“Hi,” he says again, his voice still soft, and signs simultaneously. “Are you feeling any better?” 

After a beat — her processing is still on a delay — she nods faintly and makes her affirmative sound.

“I’m going to stay over here,” he tells her. “I’m not going to come any closer or touch you unless you tell me it’s okay. Alright?” 

She nods again. 

“I’m not sure if you remember what I said earlier. My name is Dr. Spencer Reid, from the FBI. You’re in the hospital. You’re safe now. Nobody’s going to hurt you again. Can you tell me your name?” 

She tries to tell him, but all that comes out is a garbled mess of syllables. She scrunches her eyes closed and tries again, but it still comes out garbled. Getting more and more frantic — she knows she has to speak, has to let someone know who she is — she stumbles again. She tries to sign but is immediately stopped by the splints on both arms. Her attempts to vocalize turn into her same sharp distressed sound.

Reid cuts her off gently. “Okay. That’s okay. Do you think you would be able to use an AAC board?”

She nods, relieved. Without her hands and voice she doesn’t know how she would be able to cross that language barrier to ask for the tools she needed to communicate. Reid looks to Hotch at the window, who nods briskly and heads off to ask Garcia what that is — and then find one. 

“My boss is going to go get one for us. In the meantime, would it be okay if I asked you some yes or no questions? You can just nod or shake your head. Or use the sounds you’ve been using to communicate with me.” 

She considered for a long moment, unsure if she would be able to offer anything helpful or if she even wanted to try. It wasn’t that she couldn’t remember anything — just that processing it, much less expressing it, felt viscerally impossible and deeply painful. She knew at some point she would need to work through what had happened, come to terms with it, share and repeat it. But that point was still so far away in this moment of hospital beds and questions that her brain was protecting her by not letting her near it. 

Of course the question was more of a formality than anything else. He had to ask her and she had to do her best to answer. But it was kind of him, she thought, to wait until she nodded yes to ask, even so. 

“Are you autistic?” 

Yes. 

“We found you in St. Louis. Is that where you’re from?” 

No. 

He continues on with straightforward questions like these, not asking about what had been done to her but just about her, following up on questions he asked with increasingly specific and accurate guesses, until they had worked out a pretty good picture of who she was and she appeared much more comfortable, having begun to become familiar with this soft-spoken, gentle young man and the way they were speaking. He didn’t ask anything about her torturer or her treatment until the AAC board came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> could there be plot? yes there could. will there be plot? absolutely not. i am just here for the autistic reid comfort on this account, folks. i'm that "no take!! only throw" meme but it's "no hurt!! only comfort". thank you


	4. Chapter 4

Hotch knocks softly, then strides into the room, carrying the AAC board, which is actually more of a spiral ring binder of flashcards than a board. He also brings in a dusty old laptop he had someone race over with from the police precinct, reasoning that maybe she’d be able to type, although her hands will make that difficult. He is so engrossed in his task that he doesn’t think much about the effect that his presence might have, although he doesn’t come too close, skirting the edge of the room to hand the items off to Reid. 

Immediately the young woman goes perfectly still and silent, shaking hard with the difficulty. Her bandaged hands rest in her lap, held still with sharp, painful tension. Quiet hands, Reid thinks, his stomach souring. 

Hotch notices the change, of course, but doesn’t understand that this forced self-containment, this aching stillness, is just as much a sign of distress as her earlier loud, disruptive outbursts. 

“It’s okay,” Reid says, immediately, gesturing for Hotch to leave. “That’s SSA Aaron Hotchner. He’s our unit chief; my boss. He isn’t going to hurt you.” 

Hotch gives a curt nod to Reid and a soft, sympathetic look to the young woman as Reid shepherds him out. As soon as he’s left the room, Reid turns back to her. 

“He’s gone. He’s not going to hurt you. It’s okay, you’re okay. It’s alright. You’re safe. You can move again if you want to. It’s okay.” She begins to rock again, wailing, a drawn-out, painful sound. But it’s a positive sign, Reid knows. She can hear and understand him, so she likely didn’t go into a full shutdown, and self-soothing is better than the stillness. 

He gives her a moment to herself. While she calms down, he writes a text to Hotch, explaining what he’s learned. He keeps his gaze down until he hears her stop, trying not to force her to communicate before she’s ready. 

“Are you ready to try using the AAC board?” 

She nods. 

“Can I come closer so that I can read it?” 

A long moment of hesitation, then another nod. Appreciation swells in him at how difficult the task he’s asking her to complete is; how hard it is to reach out to him through her pain and discomfort and trauma. 

“You’re doing so well,” he says. “Thank you,” and to her surprise it doesn’t sound trite or condescending. Instead she can hear a genuine acknowledgement in his soft voice as she looks up to the gentle slope of his nose, away to his clever fingers signing his words — he hasn’t stopped, and she’s so grateful for the additional input it provides — and his mismatched socks and converse. 

For his part he watches carefully as she allows him into her hard-won space, pulling up a chair beside her hospital bed, holding the large, laminated binder full of words and images they can use together. It has the alphabet and a variety of questions, requests, answers, and objects. 

He flips open the binder and hands it to her, still attempting to give her as much space as possible, not touching. 

She takes it immediately and begins flipping through it, learning where to find what she needs. Laying it out on the tray table across her bed, she points to letters with shaking fingers, with such speed that Reid is taken aback. 

“One more time, please,” he says, flipping his brain into the speed-reading type of processing. 

“E-M-M-A-H-A-R-R-I-S-O-N.”

He takes out his phone again to communicate this key new information to Garcia, but before he can, Emma has flipped the pages in the binder once again. 

“TALL - MAN - POLICE- NO-POLICE - ANGRY - NO - MOVE - STOP - STAY - QUIET - NO - NO -“ 

“I don’t understand,” he cuts her off gently as her page-turning becomes slightly frantic. 

She pauses, then tries again, returning to single letter spelling, so quickly with her clunky, bandaged hands that it’s hard to see where her fingers fall. 

“That’s SSA Aaron Hotchner he’s our unit chief my boss he isn’t going to hurt you,” she spells out, and then, “NO.” 

“NO-S-S-A A-a-r-o-n H-o-t-c-h-n-e-r — o-u-r u-n-i-t c-h-i-e-f — m-y b-o-s-s.” 

“The man who took you. He reminds you of the man who just came in.” 

A curt nod. “YES - TALL - MAN - d-a-r-k h-a-i-r —“ 

Emma continues with a description. Now with the communication board in front of her, she is incredibly fluent, as if she was just waiting for the ability to speak to someone, anyone — not quite about what had happened to her, but skirting the details. 

She tells Reid some missing details about herself, tells him about the man who took her, about where she was held. When he tries, gently, to ask about what was done to her, she simply skips over it, not with evident distress but as if there’s simply a gap in her linguistic ability to touch it. He tries not to push, not wanting to hurt her any more than she had already been hurt, and already so grateful for what she had given them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some liberties taken with AAC. i have a digital board that has what i need on it and has been curated specifically for me; whatever they would turn up at the hospital would likely have a ton of arbitrary stuff on it and miss many of the things she would need. that's okay here we go regardless, we'll pretend this is sort of a master bible.


	5. Chapter 5

Emma was extremely weak and heavily medicated, and even now that she was willing to communicate she couldn’t for very long without needing to rest. After several hours of intermittent rest and talking with Reid, the agent encouraged her to try to get some real sleep. She was beginning to grow more and more comfortable with him, talking first through the AAC board and then through painstaking typing on the laptop Agent Hotchner had brought in for them to use. She was quick and witty through the evident outward shell of trauma, with snark and sarcastic opinions to offer on the hospital, on the FBI, on him. Soon they had developed a familiar repartee built on their shared experiences of being perpetually singled out. She still didn’t speak. The nurses treated her with sickeningly sweet infantilization, eyeing with pity the frail, injured girl rocking and biting and humming and making odd noises sitting with the eternally patient FBI agent who they saw as trying despite all odds to get something useful out of someone fundamentally broken. Emma had given him this biting assessment a few hours into their conversation and Reid found it hard to deny. 

Now Reid was dozing in her hospital room, waiting in case she woke up again and could give them new information. He was concerned that the bustling and sterile, impersonal touch of the hospital staff would retraumatize her, and they couldn’t afford to lose the time and insight that could set them back. Hotch had agreed, so Reid had been stationed there to serve as an advocate for her, ensuring that she was touched only as much as was fully necessary, that everything was communicated to her, and that she was given everything she needed to remain an asset to the case. 

On a personal level, he remembered his own frequent stints in the hospital — the overload of smells, lights, noises, constant touch; the ever-shifting environment of new nurses to meet and medications to be given and procedures and tests and questions. The pressure of self-advocacy was overwhelming enough without the compounding factors of hospital, which was itself stressful even to neurotypicals. He felt a responsibility to Emma, the tangle-haired figure in the hospital bed, to reduce some of that strain if he could. 

The rest of the team had volunteered to take shifts, but Reid quickly shot them down. While Hotch and Rossi at least had some familiarity with the accommodations Spencer himself required, and all of them had been there for him to some extent during shutdowns and meltdowns and trauma, including hospital stays, they were all realizing that none of them was particularly equipped to help an autistic stranger, especially after Reid tightly explained just how much he had to advocate for himself and adjust and compensate all the time, even when they meant their best, even as profilers, even with their intimate knowledge of him. (G-d, he thought, none of them had realized just how close a call was his near-poisoning with carbenicillin by Greg Baylor.) 

The next time she wakes up the sound profile has shifted again. Coming to feels like sliding into place, like the whole world has tilted to deposit her back in her body. It takes a long moment to pull her eyes open, and that in itself makes her panicked. She feels disoriented and unsteady and like she desperately has to get out of there, wherever there is, and everything in her head is memories of what had happened to her, the pain and fear and smell of it there, and it all closes in around her until she has to go, has to run or hide or run-and-hide or — She slides her feet to the ground and as she does an alarm goes off, sharp and painful in her heart, and her knees give way, and she crumples to the cold floor, wailing. 

Reid immediately jumps up, startled by the quick succession of sounds. 

“Woah!” He shouts, high-pitched, then, as his brain catches up to his mouth, brings his voice low. “It’s okay, Emma,” he murmurs, almost whispering, as he crosses the room to her and goes to his knees a few feet away. He gestures to the impatient nurse at the door to wait for him to calm her. 

“Emma, you’re in the hospital. It’s Spencer, do you remember me?” 

Suddenly she reaches a hand out to him, feeling for him through her curtain of hair. Surprised, he takes her bandaged hand gently in his. She’s tapping against his palm in Morse code, he realizes. 

“DOCTOR SPENCER REID,” she says, through a series of taps, and her wailing stops. She is still face first on the ground, her legs awkwardly half-underneath her. 

“Yes, that’s right,” he says, his voice still soft. “Can you get up?” 

“NO,” she says. “HELP, PLEASE.” 

“Okay,” he says, releasing her hand and standing, wiping off his pants in a knowingly futile attempt to remove whatever he picked up on the hospital floor. “I’ll get the nurse.” 

Her response is an immediate return to her earlier keening. 

“Understood,” he says, kneeling back down. He assesses for a long moment under the watchful eye of the waiting professional. 

“I’m going to put my hands under your arms and lift you up to sitting, okay?” 

He waits for her short, affirmative sound. She scoots her legs around to help with the angle before she gives her yes, and as carefully as possible Reid helps her up to sit with her legs in front of her and her back against his hands. They wait like this to get their breath back into them for a moment before Reid is satisfied she can support her own weight and he stands. 

“Put your arms around my neck and I’ll set you down back on the hospital bed, alright?” 

He leans down and lifts her, bridal-style, with one arm under her knees and the other wrapped around her, laying her gently back on the bed. She’s shivering with the emotional and physical effort, but she doesn’t wail again. 

“The nurse has to come check you out now,” he murmurs, reluctant to allow it but knowing he doesn’t have a choice. Emma whips her head up and glares past his ear. 

“I know. But I’ll be right here for as long as you’d like me to stay. Would it help to do some breathing exercises with me while she has a look to make sure you’re alright?” 

Emma nods and Reid gestures the nurse in. She bustles around them, taking Emma’s vitals and checking her bandages, shutting off the motion alarm on the bed and doing various other tasks as Reid and Emma sit together, Emma propped up on the tilted-up bed and Reid with one leg slung over the side to sit near her legs, leaving careful space between them, breathing together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally addressing the question of "where are all the nurses in this hospital?" answer: appearing in the interregnum between chapters where plot happens and setting the hospital up for a liability lawsuit by letting this random FBI agent carry one of their patients, is where. 
> 
> this fic will continue if i think of more comfort moments that i'm lacking from my life — i'm committed to no hurt only comfort, and all i want ultimately is an advocate with a soft voice and soft hands to take care of me, so other scenes that fit that will be tossed to emma. let me know if there's anything on those lines you want to see! thank you all for the kudos and kind words you've given on this.


End file.
